The ideal scoring set up: Awards and time penalties
Written By Akim Mansaray and Sherman Charles
Graphic by Akim Mansaray
When deciding on a scoring set up for your contest, there are several things to consider, such as the scoresheet, judges, and awards, just to name a few. Regardless, the primary focus must be fostering educational goals and developmental progress. Artistic performance assessment is understandably difficult because of the varied views and the subjective factors that impact performance curricula. Thus, the goal of this blog post is to lay out what needs to be considered to have a quality, transparent contest with integrity where education is the prize.
The following four posts discuss 1) Choosing scoresheet categories, 2) Caption weights and calculating results, 3) Choosing judges, and 4) Awards and time penalties. This post is the fourth of the four. If you have any questions about this post’s content, or if you would like to share your view on this topic, feel free to add your comments at the bottom of this page. Don’t forget to read the other three posts!
Awards and time penalties
There are a variety of perspectives on which awards to give, but here we will focus on the educational benefit of giving certain awards and refraining from giving others.
Participation Awards
While it might be a tradition to give each and every competitor a participation award, these awards have no real educational value, or quite frankly, any other value. They do not teach the students about their achievements, the progress that they have made, or the areas in which they can improve (see Losing is Good for You). In fact, they can be discouraging and humiliating, particularly to the participants that come home with no other trophy. So, rather than spending the money on dust collectors and paper weights, simply recognize the competitors with an announcement before the awards ceremony and thank them for their participation and/or consider giving out Ratings (see below).
Ratings
If you still have the desire to give everyone something, a good alternative is ratings. Ratings, here, means a categorical award determined by how many points a performance earned compared to the total number of possible points – think awards like Outstanding, Excellent, Good, Fair, or Gold, Silver, Bronze, etc. This type of award does have educational value, particularly to groups that compete at several contests in a season. One region of showchoir contests in particular—the MA, CT, RI, area—has adopted Ratings in addition to the Place Awards. They not only tell the participants how well they did in comparison to others, but it helps them gauge how much they improve over a season. Let’s say at the beginning of the season a group gets a Bronze and no place trophy. They learn from the judges’ feedback and improve their performance to get a Silver by the middle of the season, yet still no place trophy. At the end of the season, they get a Gold! Even if they never get a place trophy, they see their progress and achieve a “personal best”. Now, this might seem similar to the place trophies where the group could see their place rising from contest to contest, but one week they might be competing against two other groups and get third, then the next week they compete against 10 other groups and get 5th. Ratings remove this problem and award participants based on personal achievements rather than achievements relative to other participants. Consider adopting these at your contest and encourage your local contests to do the same. One caveat is that all of the contests should be using the same scoresheet and point ranges that qualify for each Rating.
Place Awards
Similarly speaking, while you might feel that it is important that everyone goes home with something, reconsider giving out place trophies for every single participant. We have heard from countless directors that they would rather go home with nothing than a 10th-place-out-of-10 trophy because it feels more like humiliation and punishment than it does motivation and encouragement. The scores and feedback provided by the judges are sufficient for helping competitors know where their strengths and weaknesses are and to create a path of improvement and progress.
Caption Awards
For our purposes here, caption refers to a broad group of categories that are evaluated on a scoresheet, like Vocals or Visuals. These awards are highly sought after and very motivating. Many directors and students even value these awards over the place awards. We can’t tell you how many times we have heard, “As long as we bring home Best Vocals, I am happy.” Keep these, but limit them to only the first place winners of any given caption. Oh! And be sure to use the Condorcet Method to determine these awards, too (see Consensus Scoring Methods: Lessons from the French Revolution for an explanation).
Several contests give out other awards that loosely fall under captions. These trophies are something like Best Costumes, Best Set, or Best Performer, and they are not tied to any particular category or caption on the scoresheet. While these awards have merit, we must remember that we are focusing on the educational value of awards, so you might ask yourself, who are you actually awarding here. Remember from the first blog post in this series, Choosing Scoresheet Categories, that the scoresheet should focus on learnable and applicable skills. If you do decide to give out these types of awards, either have the judges decide the winners by unanimous vote or have a dedicated judge for these awards only.
Time Penalties
Surprisingly, we are often asked about time penalties. There are a wide variety of approaches to applying time penalties, ranging from 1 point per second to 1 point per minute. Some are reluctant to apply penalties in the first place because they see it as punishing students for choices that are not their own, and they think penalties will drive away potential participants. But, not having penalties or not enforcing penalties leaves room for abuse. This outlines two questions: 1) should we have time penalties, and 2) if so, how severe or lenient should they be? Before we can answer these questions, we need to understand the point of time penalties.
Like all other competitive events, be it sports, performing arts, science competitions, engineering competitions, robot wars, etc., all of them have a set of rules and guidelines that everyone must abide by. The goal of these rules is to ensure that all competitors are doing something that is comparable, that there is a common achievable goal, so that injury does not occur, so that events run on time, and a variety of other things that help make the contest “fair”. Anyone who violates these rules receives a penalty, or in extreme cases, disqualification. Thus, rules are an important part of competitions.
Let’s say that at a math contest there is a time limit to try and solve a complex problem. One competitor does not figure it out on time, but as the judges are going around to the other competitors to check their answers, they continue to work on the problem in secret. The person who is in charge of keeping time sees the competitor working and records how much the competitor went over the allotted time in order to determine the appropriate penalty. The judges check this competitor’s answer and it is correct and by far the most elegant solution to the problem. The time keeper now feels reluctant to inform the score tabulator that the competitor went over time because it now seems like a punishment and they are afraid they won’t come back to the contest again the next year. So, the time keeper decides not to tell the score tabulator. This competitor ends up winning the contest even though they did not obey the rules. In this hypothetical situation, one competitor decides to break the rules and in doing so they win the contest. This is the type of situation that you are trying to prevent by not only establishing a time limit but enforcing it, too.
Now that the reason for time penalties (and other rules) is clear, let’s discuss the severity of the penalty. To do this, take this analogue as an example. In school, assignments typically have due dates, and depending on the instructor, you might be able to turn it in late for a penalty. I (author Sherman) don’t have any sources to support what I do, but in the undergraduate and graduate level courses that I teach at the university, if I decide to implement a late penalty, I typically try to make it severe enough that they drop a letter grade on the assignment – around 10%. I do try to be lenient, especially if the assignment is only minutes late. However, if the assignment was due week 2 of the semester and they turn it in on week 4, I typically will not accept it. What is crucial, though, is that all of my students are aware of this ahead of time and that it is clearly spelled out in the syllabus and/or assignment instructions. When translated to something like showchoir, the time penalties might look similar, perhaps starting at 15 seconds over, 10% of the total possible points is deducted, and after 5 minutes, the competitor is disqualified.
This option might work for some, but it also might be too lenient or even too harsh for others. The time limits, windows of forgiveness, and the maximum time over is somewhat arbitrary. We say “somewhat” because there are a few things that can help you decide how severe and strict you want and need to be. First, if you often have groups going over time, it is probably a good idea to enforce a stricter penalty. Second, if the time penalty is so lenient that it does not affect the outcome, then it is probably a good idea to enforce a stricter penalty. Regardless of your choices, make sure everyone knows what the penalty is and enforce it when a competitor does in fact go over.
Some of you might be thinking that if you do actually enforce a time penalty, then competitors will not attend your contest. But here’s the thing: everyone wants to go to a contest that is fair and on time. If your contest has a reputation for being the fairest and most on time, that alone will attract more competitors. If you and everyone else near you geographically speaking all consistently uphold the penalties, then there is no choice but to obey the rules. It’s a way of saying if you want to play the game then you have to follow the rules. However, everyone needs to be a part of establishing and enforcing the rules, thus creating a community of self accountability.